When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
Literature, rather than works of literature, work differently. An individual essay or a novel or an epic poem have story lines in that there are ebbs and flows and climaxes, the reader wondering what is going to happen next, as you do in politics, but literature in itself is accurately regarded as what Wulbert would call a culture in that for however long it lasts it is the same thing, the same vision, even if people did know that there were other periods that preceded the one you are in where the forms and contents seem inevitable and everlasting until one period moves on to the next, popping from Classic to Romantic, from Abstract Expressionist to Contemporary, from Renaissance to Mannerist, just like poof! because whatever obtains seem the natural way to do things. So literature is of a piece, Hume and Gibbon sharing their sense of history with religion as the bane of social progress, until Hazlitt and Macaulay made the spirit of the age as the queen of historical explanation. The 1950’s through the 1980’s offered a new Black history which showed how retched were the conditions of the slaves and ex-slaves, and the old standards for the history of the South, such as those by Ulrich Phillips and Douglas Freeman, got snubbed.
With this in mind, that history is long and art is eternal, consider a subgenre of literature so as to see how to square the changeability of politics with the essentials of art. There is the subgenre of the Second World War that lasts from “Sahara” to “Band of Brothers”, which lasts from when we Americans are deeply into it until when there are still old men who can recount what happened to them, all trying to make sense of this horrible thing that had happened to them. The themes and structures are the same and most of all the outcome, which is what to make of the whole thing.
Humphrey Bogart, in “Sahara”, is the sergeant of a tank crew and his penance controls the scene which is set in the North African desert when an isolated tank finds a water hole and also learns that a German convoy is coming towards them and they decide to stop them. They use a number of devices to make the Germans think they have plenty of water when, in fact, they have a small supply, but it holds up the column which is desperate for water. The movie makes a reader feel really thirsty. The tank crew eventually get all the Germans to surrender and learn that the British have just won at El Alamein. The continuing theme of the movie, summed up very overtly in its coda, is that the tank crew was United Nations on the march. There was an Italian from Italy, played inevitably by J. Caroll Nash, and a “Frenchie” and a Brit, most of whom died to keep the Germans at bay. This lesson learned while the end of the war was not yet decided, is that all of these peoples are important and have something to contribute as well as their utter humanity, which is the purpose of the war in the first place. Less cynical than “Casablanca” from the same year, 1943, but heartfelt, I think, not just a plaudit to tie up ends of the story but what it all meant.
And here is the other end. “Band of Brothers”, the miniseries created in 2001 by Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg on the basis of a book by Stephen Ambrose, when the actual participants are still able to make their comments about their experiences in the war, is different from most war movies. It has what I would call a semi-documentary style. The main protagonist, Lieutenant and then Captain and then Major Dick Winters, hardly figures in the first episode as would not happen in a John Wayne movie. Winter emerges as a stronger and stronger figure as the series goes on, centered mostly at the end of the war. Mostly, there are the numerous soldiers of the 101st Airborne from Normandy until after the war who aare, in the Spielberg portrayal, cluster together in groups as if they were people in old photographs where you vaguely remember one or another figure however much they are familiar with one another, dropping in and out of the story so as to provide a sense of the world of medics in one story, and another of the role of lieutenants.
The battles are also different from usual war movies. There are few or any close combat actions, Rather, there is the artillery bombardments that do considerable damage never knowing when the next shell will land in your own foxhole, The enemy is seen at a distance, the Americans reluctant to make an overt assault, as does happen when Winter finds it necessary to do so because he can’t do otherwise and is able to kill a large number of the enemy though what Winters retains, rather than the deftness with which he handled his troops, is the memory of when he shot dead a German soldier who he had seen face to face, or when his troops assault a town when they have to move quickly and the company lieutenant moves slow, Spielberg excellent, as he does in so many of his movies, to show visually the logic of the stories unfolding, what was the problem and how it was resolved, as well as repeating motifs, as when every medic says that the one wounded is going to be alright even though seconds away from dying. It was the right thing to say.
Also typical of Spielberg, though much done with deliberately fewer resources to color and setting, are his landscapes. There are the fires in the night background at Carentan, soon after D-Day; there are the fields of snow at Bastogne and, most memorable, the sunshine through the trees as the troopers go on guard in a German forest that is much too quiet who come upon a concentration camp who, they learn, cannot feed the inmates too quickly because the inmates are so emaciated that they will throw up a heavy meal and die. Spielberg has Winters meet a haughty German woman proud of her husband’s picture who is later seen as being forced to observe her nearby concentration camp. Their eyes meet and the viewer takes it that the moral superiority of the Americans has been established in that it is the Germans who did that. The sides of a war, most wars, are not equivalents, and that is a message about the series, though not the only one, including the idea that American soldiers try to be resourceful while they do what they have to do, sharing that American belief that they are a can do and decent people, a theme throughout war movies and war novels, though different from Norman Mailer who has a fascistic American general in “The Naked and the Dead” offer that hardship makes soldiers more hardy and vicious, Irwin Shaw in “The Young Lions” who thinks the army camps rife with anti-Semitism, where Spielberg has his gentiles hate the original company commander who is Jewish but think that not pertinent. But Mailer and Shaw were writing in the late Forties, trying to find something sensational to say about the war recently concluded. Steadier hands came later on and before, during the war, as when “A Goy Named Joe”, Humphery Bogart plays an ordinary joe full of dedication and street savvy who figures out how to guide government officials to a nest of spies. Good sense and moral sense will prevail.
The most important truth of “Band of Brothers” is much more abstract, embedded in the nature of the enterprise, which is that this war will end. The truth is that historical periods end, like a pop, as literary or cultural periods do, suddenly, when it is over, and not knowing what kind of configuration of forces will arise next. That happened in World War II. A soldier in a truck moving forward while thousands and thousands of Germans are moving in the opposite direction to surrender, yells in frustration to the Germans whether this whole thing had been necessary. When some American soldiers hear that Hitler had killed himself, one remarks deadpan that Hitler could have killed himself three years ago and saved us all the bother, and there is a good deal of truth to that in that a Hitler long dead or who never existed might well have enjoyed Germany becoming the central power of continental Europe for reasons of economy and culture, as in fact it did at the end of the twentieth Century, stymied temporarily only because Hitler had a naive belief that only military achievement counted. The war had been such a waste and unnecessary and therefore sad, now that it was over. That and two atomic bombs put an end to the war, even as some tried to extend it. Now Major Winter thinks of remaining a shoulder and getting on with the war in the Pacific, perhaps just to extend that war, and instead goes into tame civilian occupation as a business executive, just to live out his life after the great adventure of his youth is over, trying to repair their wounds, as was true of so many veterans, leaving the next age to unfold.
As surely it did but with different issues. The post World War II world included Communism and anti-Communism, the suburbs, the rise of the working class into the middle class, the civil rights movement and the large scale of women into the workforce a mere ten years after Rosie the Riveter had put away her tools so as to stay home and raise a family. That was all different from before, what was in the war, including a cold war which was all anticipation of cataclysmic disaster that, to all of our surprises, never happened, however much the nightmare of how wide would be of the perimeter of total destruction with lower Manhattan as ground zero remained as lifelong memories. A strange war that also endeed, suddenly, in 1989 when the Soviet Union fell followed hard upon Islmic terrorism which began with highjacked planes in the Nineties and that lasted until the past week, when Biden got out of Afghanistan. What's next?